CM 237: Elaine Fox on Mental Agility
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A lot of the fear of uncertainty is associated with worrying, and when we worry, we often ask the kind of why question, you know, why did this happen to me? I think to help us get unstuck out of that kind of loop, you need to start asking, what can I actually do about it? Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. Change is a part of life, and it's a big part of growing and developing. Yet, with change comes uncertainty, and that can cause us to get stuck.

To thrive during change, we need a mental agility that comes from self-awareness, emotional awareness, and situational awareness. It's about what Elaine Fox calls switchcraft. Elaine Fox is a leading psychologist and performance coach who spent her career working with athletes, military leaders, and executives. What she's seen is that the most successful people are the ones who can toggle between different approaches, who have an agile mind.

In her book, Switchcraft, The Hidden Power of Mental Agility, Elaine Fox teaches us what it means to be mentally agile and how to master its key components. It's the perfect book for managing all of the change and uncertainty that surrounds us today. One quick ask, if you like the podcast, take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Elaine Fox.

Elaine Fox, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. Thanks very much, Gayle, and thank you very much for having me on. What is Switchcraft and why is it so important?

Well, Switchcraft is really, I often explain it as being a set of mental talents, really, that we all have that help us to cope with a very uncertain world. And I don't need to tell you that, obviously, Gail, in recent years, it's become very obvious to all of us how uncertain the world can be.

You know, we've got a war going on in Ukraine at the moment. We've had the COVID pandemic. There's a lot of political uncertainty all around the world. A lot of this has actually come on the back of a lot of actually quite stable time. I think for a long period, at least in the developed world, you know, we had pretty stable time. And then we had a lot of upheaval, particularly with the pandemic. So it's really tough, I think, for people to cope with that type of uncertainty. So Switchcraft is really about...

all of the research around how we deal with that kind of uncertain world. And one of the things my own research has been looking at for many years is that, you know, the world has really always been uncertain. It's been uncertain for our ancestors. It's always been uncertain for us. But I think that's just become much more obvious to us in the last couple of years because of these major, you know, global events that have happened. You've identified four pillars of Switchcraft.

Can you tell us what they are and why you chose them? Sure. Well, I think the most important one probably is mental agility. So really to get at this idea that being mentally agile is really critical. And maybe I can just tell you a little story. It's kind of a funny story. When I was in London a number of years ago, I just read this story about

in the newspaper that was on the train. It actually made me laugh out loud. It was a story about an armed robbery that had taken place by robbers that weren't particularly competent. These people had held up a store and had robbed something. One of them was a bus driver and they were actually using his bus as the getaway vehicle.

So when the police were in pursuit, they suddenly realised that the bus was actually taking its normal route, not necessarily the fastest route away. So it literally made me laugh out loud. But I kind of realised afterwards that that really illustrates a pretty important principle of psychology. And that is when we get under pressure, when we get under stress,

we tend to refer to the familiar, what's actually familiar to us. We tend to do things in a pretty rigid kind of way. So things that worked before. You know, Gail, that situation where you maybe have lost your keys and you keep going back and looking in the same place. You think they should be there. You know you've looked there, but actually that is not there. So you revert into that very repetitive kind of rigid way of behaving and thinking.

So really, you know, mental agility is the opposite of that. It's the ability to shift our mindset very rapidly if the situation changes or shift our behavior very rapidly if the situation changes. So that's one of the really core elements of switchcraft, being mentally agile.

But then it's not really about being agile just for the sake of being agile. If we just changed or were agile for no particular reason, that wouldn't actually be very adaptive. So that kind of agility is informed by the three other pillars. So the three other pillars basically are self-awareness. So really being aware of ourselves and our abilities and what we're capable of.

Secondly, situational awareness. So really understanding the situation we're in, whether that's a business situation or a personal situation, really having a good understanding of the dynamics, if you like, of that kind of situation.

And finally, emotional awareness, just being aware of our own emotions. And, you know, I think it's really important that we embrace all of those emotions because the negative emotions, as well as the positive ones, are actually telling us something. It's kind of nature's way of informing us about what's going on around us. So all of those three things...

feed into mental agility, really. So, you know, we want to strive for a more informed mental agility so we actually make the right decision at the right time. That's the key, really. In your book, you talk about the connection between resilience and agility. What does healthy resilience look like and how can we build it?

It's a really, really good question. And resilience is a very interesting concept. So I've been doing a lot of research for a number of years now in resilience. And, you know, for a long time, a lot of researchers and a lot of people think about resilience as being something that your people are more or less immune to stress. And that's just absolutely wrong. That's not what resilience is. What we now consider to be resilient is resilience.

a good definition probably is, you know, if you're doing better than expected based on what you've been through. So, for example, if you're a refugee and you've and there's been a war in your country and there's been upheaval and you've had to walk, you know, 300 miles to go over a border for safety, you may be very stressed and anxious and depressed. But actually, given what you've been through, you might actually be quite resilient

So in our research now, that's what we try and do. We try and take into account people's life experiences, what they've been through. And then we kind of we know the norm, if you like. We know what what the average kind of reaction would be to that situation. So people who are doing much better than that, we consider resilient and people who are doing much worse, we consider not to be quite so resilient.

That's a really empowering way of looking at resilience by taking, you know, what are the ways that you're actually making the situation work for yourself? Like, what are the things you're doing? And when I hear you say that, the first thing I thought was we have such a

a judgmental sense so often of our experience you know we didn't handle it perfectly we didn't overcome everything and I think what you're saying is but what did you what were you able to do and build on that is that what I'm hearing absolutely that's absolutely right Gail I think you know when we think about it um you know first of all I think life is very uncertain as we said at the beginning um and I think just accepting that as the norm and normalizing it

So when some adversity happens, you know, actually having a bit of self-compassion and, you know, you're going to feel very bad. You're going to feel very sad if, say, a friend of yours has died or has got ill or something like that. It's very normal to have those kind of feelings.

And I think sometimes we do tend to give ourselves a hard time, really. We kind of have this idea that we should be able to cope with anything. And that's just not accurate. That's not really what we now understand by resilience. It's really accepting that bad things do happen, but actually we really have the ability to get through them. And that's the other thing that people often don't realise that resilience

actually, we're all far more resilient than we actually think. You know, we actually think we can't cope with situations, but almost all the research now looking at how people cope after serious adversities like, say, terrorist attacks or pandemics or, you know, major tsunamis, major earthquakes, that kind of thing. The reality is that about, I think it's usually on average about 70% of people are actually highly resilient and get on with rebuilding their lives. And

a small group of people develop PTSD or, you know, really serious kind of anxiety problems. And then a small percentage of people, about 10%, actually experience what's called post-traumatic growth. So they actually improve, if you like, after a major adversity. This is actually particularly the case in, say, a personal illness. You know, it's often the case when people have, say, got through cancer or some serious illness.

They often feel that actually it's made them really realize what they really have in their lives and the things that are really important to them. So actually, some people experience this post-traumatic growth, which is like the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder. The first pillar of Switchcraft that you mentioned is mental agility. You explain that it's important for us to work on being cognitively flexible.

Say more about that. What does that mean? Okay, Gil, the interesting thing about cognitive flexibility is it's really about being able to shift your mindset pretty rapidly. And that may be in a number of things. So if I can give you an example. So imagine that there's a situation that's happened that you find quite upsetting. Maybe it's been a conflict with the workplace.

colleague, maybe you've had an argument with your partner or something has happened where you've had an argument and you feel really quite upset about it. Now, everyone has these challenging experiences.

But the key is to now try and, in your head, you have an explanation for that. You think, well, my colleague was being very unfair. He didn't listen to me. You'll probably have some interpretation of making you feel upset. So the trick is to now think about another interpretation of the same event. Is there another possible explanation? So, for example, let's say you met a friend on your way into work and they just seem to totally ignore you. They didn't really engage.

You might think, oh, they've just been very rude. They're not interested. But actually another way of interpreting that might be, maybe they've got a lot of stress going on. Maybe they've just got bad news and they're rushing somewhere. So I think...

Just practicing trying to change perspective and trying to think of different explanations for those kind of events. That's kind of an exercise that often happens in talking therapy, you know, where people ask to challenge their negative beliefs and change their interpretations of things. But we can all do this with just everyday events. So the kind of events like that, that kind of really upset you and you're really struggling to get over, rather than rigidly keeping to, you know, keep the same interpretation of what happened.

just try and practice, you know, thinking of a couple of different interpretations. So that's a very simple way of, you know, shifting perspective. And that's one aspect of what we call cognitive flexibility. So being able to shift that kind of perspective. Another thing is to really...

is to just get the idea of switching very quickly from one task to another. And I have quite a few exercises in the book which really help with this. And I think one of the things I say in the book is that, you know, there's no such thing as multitasking. I mean, I think most of us know this now. You know, we often think multitasking is great and some people are really good at it.

But actually, it is a bit of a myth that people can multitask. What's actually happening is people are switching very quickly from one thing to the other. So they're not actually doing two things at the same time. They're focusing on one and then switching very rapidly between the two. Now, there's two important elements of this, actually. So one of the things I argue in the book and really show the evidence around is that it's actually very important not to do that under normal circumstances. So if you're, you know,

like a lot of people, you know, you may have a number of different projects you're working on at any given time. Plus you have your normal, you know, your personal life and different things.

If you just finish one and go to the other straight away with no kind of switch in between, with no gap in between them, that is actually very draining. That takes up a lot of mental energy. The brain actually soaks up a lot of energy to switch. So we know that from very simple behavioral tasks we do in the lab, we know that this energy is taken up by switching. So switching from a big thing like one project to another project is actually quite difficult.

So I think generally speaking, it's really important when you're, say, doing one project and then you've got another project, if you can just get up for maybe five minutes, walk around, have a cup of coffee, just taking a little break in between is really important and will leave you feeling much more energised.

So that's one important aspect of it. I think generally try not to switch from one thing to the other. However, I have got a lot of exercises in the book which ask you to do exactly that and purely as a training exercise. So to literally try and switch from one thing to the other very quickly, because the more you do that, even though generally it's not recommended in everyday life, but actually that's a good way of training your brain to switch very quickly. And so one simple exercise I've

recommended and we've tried this out in the lab with teenagers, for example, with adults, and it actually works very well. So just, you know, give yourself about whatever amount of time you have. So say you've got half an hour, 40 minutes,

Come up with about three or four tasks that you think will take you, you know, around five to 10 minutes each, maybe. So you might have to write an email. You know, you might want to book a hotel room online, for example. So come up with, you know, three or four tasks like that, that you know isn't going to take a huge amount of time. And what you do is you simply set your phone or timer to go off after, say, two minutes.

So you start one task, you start working on it. And once that timer goes off, you instantly switch to the other one. And then once the timer goes off again, you instantly switch to the next one, even if you're not finished. Now, that can be quite hard to do. But as an exercise, it can actually really improve your ability to switch very quickly. Because when we break down what we call task switching in psychology, which is this ability to switch mindset,

There's two key processes there. The first process is moving away from what you've previously been doing. And then you've got a kind of a little gap where you start thinking about what you need to do next. And then you actually put that into action. So you shift on to the next one.

So you can see how that's, you know, can be very draining. If you just literally go from stopping one thing onto the next thing, you haven't really given yourself time to disengage from the first task. So you might suddenly move on to the second one, but you're still lingering thoughts about the first one. So I think, you know, learning how to switch very quickly can be a very good exercise.

One of the things I keep in mind, I'm a big basketball fan, and one of the things I always keep in mind for the kind of switching you're talking about is I think a lot about how professional athletes, athletes in general, they, let's say in basketball, you go to take a shot and you don't make it.

And if you let that linger in your mind, you can't move on as quickly to the next thing. So I would think that they probably have to learn in their careers how to take those shots, miss, but keep moving on. Almost like learn from it, but forget about it so that you can like don't hold on to it so that you can move on to the next thing. And it sounds like a lot about what you're saying.

Absolutely. I think, you know, I've worked a lot with sports people as well. And you're absolutely right. Your agility is vital in sports. And actually, I was quite a good junior tennis player in Ireland where I grew up and I used to play on the junior tennis circuit. And I remember one time there was somebody I used to play very regularly who, you know, she won about 60 percent of the time. I won about 40 percent of the time. So we were pretty evenly matched.

But she really didn't, she had quite a weak backhand. So the trick with her was always to, you know, play against her background. But I remember in one match, I was just consistently losing point after point. And I talk about this in the book, actually. And at some point, my coach, who was at the back of the court, kind of whispered to me, he said, actually, you know, her backhand is not so good today. You know, it's actually not that good. So why don't you keep going to the backhand? Which was totally against everything I'd learned, because I knew her style of play very well.

And the interesting thing was in the heat of the moment, I couldn't see that my kind of rigid kind of behavior, way of playing wasn't actually very effective because suddenly she was playing a little bit differently than she normally played. So actually when I switched and started really

you know, going to an area which normally she was very strong in. And actually, you know, we turned around and I actually won the match. But the interesting thing was I actually hadn't seen that. You know, the coach could see it, but I hadn't seen it. And so it's really important for athletes. And that's where, you know, when I was talking about really understanding your situation, really –

If you're taking in information in real time and realizing, actually, this may not be usually the way things are going in this situation, but actually this is the way it's going. So I need to change my behavior. I need to change my tactic in a way.

The second pillar of switchcraft is self-awareness. Does that mean knowing our personality type? I have a feeling that's not the case. Talk to us about this. There's four things really that I kind of talk about in those chapters. One is definitely personality. So having some understanding of how you typically respond in a situation is important. But I think it's very interesting. Some psychologists call that the psychology of the stranger, which I always think is a very nice phrase here.

And what they actually mean by that is when you meet a stranger, you can tell pretty accurately, fairly quickly what their personality style might be. So you can tell if they're pretty extroverted, you know, all of those kind of common things that it's pretty obvious to pick up very quickly. So understanding that aspect of your personality is helpful on one level, but it's actually it's just a very superficial understanding of yourself.

So I think we need to really go beyond that. And so one of the things I talk about in the book is a really interesting body of research, which looks at, you know, what is your own personal narrative? What is your story? And we all have over the years, we've all come up with a kind of a narrative of how we deal with different situations.

So there's a couple of exercises that are very much like the kind of research that's done. So it asks people to say, for example, you know, what's the worst thing that ever happened to you? Or what's the best thing? What was the best moment of your life? If you were to pick out one moment, what would that be? And you're asked to just write down maybe 100 words or so, just explain that in as much detail as possible.

and really fleshing out, you know, were there other people there? How did it feel? You know, was there any particular smells around that? You know, get as much sensory experience into that kind of memory as you can. And then there's a way of very systematically going through that story where you can work out what your normal kind of narrative is.

So, for example, one of the particularly mentally healthy type of narrative is what's called the redemption narrative. So where that's the idea that often things go wrong and things go badly for you, but then actually it turns in the end and it manages to turn the end and you come out of it well, even though it may not be in the way you expected. So that kind of redemption narrative is actually quite a good sign of good mental health.

So getting to that deeper level of understanding, that's if you imagine when you meet somebody, say, for the first time, you don't know much about them. But as your friendship deepens, as you get to know them a bit better, you learn a bit of their stories. They'll tell you some stories about what happened at different parts of their lives. And it's that level of self-awareness that's really important, I think, to really kind of get a much deeper sense of your own kind of personal narrative.

And then there's a third thing, which I think is really important and we tend to forget, and that's to really listen to our body, to our physical reactions. Because again, nature is very clever in terms of giving us information about the world around us. So really, you know,

And trying to tune in a bit more to our body. Is our heart beating a little bit faster than usual? Are we getting a little bit sweaty, for example? All of these things are physical signals telling us that we're not particularly comfortable in this situation, or maybe we're very excited in this situation, or we're nervous or anxious sometimes.

So I think, you know, tuning into the body is really important. And if I can, Gail, I know I'm probably talking a little bit too much in this answer, but I think to understand that in a way, we need to understand a little bit about how the brain works. So we now know we used to think in neuroscience that the brain works by, you know, something happens in the world, there's a signal there, and then we react to that in some way.

Now we realize that's actually not the way it works. What actually happens is the brain predicts what's likely to happen next and then acts accordingly. So we actually predict first before the event actually happens. And so what that means is that our brain has really calculated, if you like, big data right from the moment we were born. And even in fact, before we were born, the brain has made connections between particular sights and sounds and feelings.

which is kind of where intuition comes from. So I talk a lot in the book about tuning into your intuition. And for me, there's nothing magical about intuition. It's really the brain using its own big data. So for example, there might be a particular sight and a smell that was linked with fear in the past. Now, you don't consciously remember that.

But your brain remembers that connection. It remembers, you know, when we were in this situation before, when we felt this kind of feeling and there was a particular smell or a particular kind of light, you actually something something nasty happened, something bad happened. So you get this fake feeling of apprehension and fear. And so that's really how intuition is working, is telling you something about some past experience that

but there's not enough information to make that conscious so you don't actually know what consciously happened and but actually it gives you information about you know how you how you're feeling and so tuning in to that level of intuition is really really important and that's kind of a part of self-awareness as well

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As you were talking about self-awareness, I just wanted to go back to something you brought up a little bit earlier, which is the personal stories and helping people craft those stories in a very deliberate, positive way. Sometimes I think one of the challenges we have with self-awareness is we get stuck in certain stories. What do we do with that? Maybe sometimes we recognize we're stuck, maybe we don't, but how do we think about that?

Absolutely. And again, that's exactly the opposite of agility. As you said, that's where mental agility is so important. I think the idea of actually trying to come up with different interpretations, because usually when we have these personal stories, we have an interpretation of that story. As we were saying before, we have our particular interpretation of it, that this is what happened, this is why it happened.

And so really challenging that and really saying, well, is that really the case? Maybe that is right. Maybe that is the right interpretation. But actually, maybe there's another interpretation. A lot of the fear of uncertainty is associated with worrying. And when we worry, we often ask the kind of why question. Why did this happen to me? I think to help us get unstuck out of that kind of loop,

you need to start asking, what can I actually do about it? So really making it, which is a much more positive way of thinking about it. So rather than thinking about why something happened, because that may be impossible to answer, you know, lots of things happen and there isn't really any explanation. And so change that question to, okay, this has happened. Now, what can I do to get out of this situation? The fourth pillar you raise is situational awareness. And you've talked a little bit about this. That's why I want to move into this pillar. You've talked about intuition and,

Can you bring a little bit more into that when you think about entering into a situation and maybe the connection between situational awareness and intuition? It's really just trying to open yourself and act on those kind of feelings. And I think in the business world in particular, I've done quite a few workshops with people in business. And business people often say that actually there's a lot to be said for intuition and intuitive feelings about how things are going. And a lot of people are very...

you know, unwilling to accept that. And I think it's important to remember that we have two types of information we can get. We have the information that comes from our rational mind, if you like. So looking at the facts and the figures and rational analysis of a situation. And that's obviously critically important. That's really important in lots of situations to have those facts identified.

But we also have another type of information, which is coming from this much more intuitive sense. And as I said, that's coming really from our brain's kind of analysis of big data that all through our life, our brain has remembered connections between different situations.

And it doesn't remember enough about it to actually make it consciously. It's not in our conscious awareness, but it's enough to give us a good feeling. So the trick of making really good decisions, particularly, I think, in very stressful situations is,

is to actually have both of those things working together. You know, you need the facts and the figures and the rational analysis, of course. But you also need to really be guided by those gut feelings because those gut feelings usually are actually quite accurate. You know, it's telling you, well, this isn't actually a very good situation for whatever reason. You may not be able to identify why, but it's kind of,

telling you something. So I think just learning to tune into that. And there's a really nice story in the, which I talk about in the book, which I came across. And there was a driver called, I can't remember his first name, but his second name was Fangio. And he was an Argentinian Formula One driver back in the, I think it was in the 1960s.

And there was one incident he recounted at the Monaco race course where normally his style was when he went into a tunnel on this particular circuit, he would accelerate coming out of that tunnel. And he was very, very good at that. He was able to accelerate on the bend and really, you know, get a kind of a bit of extra speed over his competitors. But for this one moment, as he came out of the tunnel where he would normally accelerate,

He said he actually slowed down and his team back in the kind of lab of the eye, where they're looking at all the details, they realized he was slowing down. And after the race, he couldn't understand in that time what made him slow down. But actually, he was very lucky he did, because when he got around the next corner, there was a big pileup in the middle of the racetrack. And of course, if he'd accelerated, he would have piled straight into them.

But the really interesting thing was, he said, how did I know that? He said, obviously, there was some kind of intuitive sense that he should slow down, which was totally opposite to what he would normally do. And they actually interrogated, as they do in Formula One, they have a lot of debriefing afterwards. They look at all the facts and figures and try and figure out why did he behave in that? What clue did he have that he should slow down? And what they realized in the end was that

normally when he came out of a tunnel, all of the heads of the people would be looking towards him, of course. So everybody, all the spectators would be looking down at the tunnel and looking towards him. But unbeknownst to him, he didn't realize this consciously. But of course, all the heads were looking in the opposite direction when he was coming out of the tunnel. So his brain obviously said to him, this isn't right. You know, people aren't looking...

at you coming out of the tunnel, they're looking in the opposite direction. So there must be something going on around the corner. And of course there was, there was a huge pileup. So that's kind of an example of how that was the intuitive brain picking up, this isn't right. You know, something is going on here. He couldn't consciously remember that, but actually when they went back and they looked at the videos, they realized it was at that moment when he kind of noticed the spectators that he actually slowed down, which is very much against his normal behavior.

You argue that intuition can be enhanced by exposing ourselves to lots of experiences. Say more about this. One of the things that I really talk about in Switchcraft is the importance of diversifying our mind.

You know, when you think of if you talk to financial advisors and you say, like, what's the best way to deal with a chaotic market if things are pretty chaotic in the market? And the answer usually is diversify your portfolio. You know, don't put everything into one basket, just diversify. And it's very much like that with our mentality, with our mental abilities, right?

So the analogy I use in the book is if you imagine playing golf, for example. So when a golfer goes out, I don't actually play golf, but when a golfer goes out, they carry quite a large number of golf clubs with them because, of course, they're likely to face different situations on the golf course. So you've got some very long shots. You might end up in a bunker where you need a different type of club to get out of the bunker. Sometimes you've got your putting on a very smooth green. So if you went onto a golf course with just one type of club,

You'd be very good at some kind of shots, but you'd really struggle in all of the other types of shots. So it's a bit like that with life and mental abilities. If you only have one technique or one tactic, that might be great for one particular situation, but actually is not good for all situations.

And, you know, one of the things that's often struck me, you know, we have a lot of really good evidence-based techniques in psychology to help people deal with stress and anxiety and different things. So things like, you know, mindfulness, readiness, growth mindset, there's a lot of these good techniques which are very much evidence-based. There is a lot of evidence for them. But the interesting thing is none of those is good for every single situation that you might be faced with. There is no one size fits all technique.

I think that's really at the core, I suppose, of Switchcraft. I'm really saying that you need to diversify. You need to have lots of different abilities and different things. So mindfulness might be very good in some situations and it might help you. But in other situations, it may be exactly the wrong thing to do. So I think the more you travel, the more you expose yourself to different situations and

the more you learn how to behave in different ways and that people do behave in different ways, particularly, I think, you know, traveling overseas. I mean, any parent, for example, will tell you if you're looking at parenting, you know, you need to try out lots of different techniques to really connect and support your kids. So everything from, you know, strict discipline to ice cream, you know, giving them treats. You know, there's lots of different tactics. You can imagine if you're only using one or two things, you're not going to get very far, really.

I think that's one of the advantages of you using the word craft, and I'm sure this is why you were so deliberate about it, because when I think of craft, I think of

something that's much more localized, something that's much more customized, right? And you're asking us to customize this in getting a lot of exposure, but then essentially what we end up doing is not a one size fits all, which is more kind of like the opposite of craft, right? It's the mass market, it's the mass produced. And you're saying, no, you're going to have to couple this together for yourself and exposure helps with that.

One of the things about intuition, and you write about this, is that it's not always correct, right? So it's got all this upside, but then it's not always the most accurate or correct. And we know this. How do you balance that with putting it to work for you? I think it is absolutely true. And that's not what intuition is for. You know, intuition is very much there to give us this kind of literally gut feeling of, you know, whether things might be going well or not.

So I think it's always important to have the rational side as well. So I think you should never really go on only intuition, I think, for that reason, because that's not really its job. Its job is to kind of inform our rational decision making. And we've all had that feeling you might meet somebody and everything seems fine. You know, it seems they seem like a really nice person. They seem very charming, but you're just getting a slight feeling of apprehension. Something isn't quite right.

And so I think just balancing that with what you know about the person and just trying to understand how accurate that intuition might be. And it's very difficult. There's no hard and fast rules. But I think this is, again, where the diversity comes in. The more situations you've been in,

the more likely you are to get that right because you've literally, I mean, our brain is like, I don't know if people are familiar with machine learning, but the idea with machine learning is like, you know, having an algorithm that looks at this big data. So often it finds patterns there, which we couldn't see with the naked eye. And that's kind of what the brain does. The brain really is looking at, you know, billions and billions of bits of information over our entire lives and

And it's coming up with those kind of connections and gut feelings that are telling us this is a really good situation, even though there might be some rational stuff that says maybe we should be cautious here or the opposite. You know, the rational mind might be saying, actually, this is a very good situation. This is a good investment, for example, you should go for. But actually, your intuition is kind of saying, well, maybe be a little bit careful here.

Elaine, in your chapter on situational awareness, you mention a framework that can guide us in considering when to switch and when to stick. You know, when we're switching, so the key question we all have to ask ourselves is, should we stick with what we're doing or should we switch to something else? And sometimes sticking is right. Sometimes persistence really does pay off. And sometimes it's important to be gritty and just to keep going at the same time. But a lot of the time, you know, um,

we're kind of, if you like, banging your head against a brick wall. You might be persistent with something, but it's just not working out. And I think at some point it's learning that actually you've come to a point where actually you've tried the same thing over and over and you're getting the same result that isn't the result you want. So I think that's when you need to kind of switch to something else.

And that's where I think all of these three components are really important. So to make that decision, that's why the agility needs to be informed by awareness of the situation, awareness of yourselves, awareness of your emotions. And I think the key to remember is with that switching, there's different elements of that.

The first element is you're moving away from a very tried and tested technique. And that's kind of effectively moving out of your comfort zone. So we all like to stay in our comfort zone. We all we get familiar with things. It's comfortable. It's not challenging. And so particularly when we're under a bit of stress, it's kind of comforting to stay there and to keep doing the same thing.

But actually in that situation, that might be exactly when we do need to switch. So by using that kind of looking at the situation in a very honest way, looking at ourselves, looking at our emotional reactions, trying to tune into these kind of feelings, you know, being really honest and open with yourself effectively and thinking, well, actually, maybe I do need to push myself a bit here. Maybe I need to do something a bit different rather than just sticking with the same kind of familiar routines.

Toward the end of your book, you talk about 12 principles of switchcraft, and these are principles to live by. Is there one or maybe two that you have found most helpful, or maybe they come up the most as you work with people?

Yeah, again, that's a great, great question. And I think quite a few of them are things that are pretty familiar. So like learning to embrace uncertainty, as we've talked about, that's really important. And there's lots of techniques in the book that talk about that. But I think one of the things that people might be less familiar with is really keeping an album of good memories. And this is particularly good for people who are prone to being quite anxious and depressed.

So if you're anxious and depressed, you tend to have quite a negative worldview of things and quite a negative worldview of the past. You know, things never worked out for me. You know, I've tried things before and it just hasn't worked out. So keeping a little diary of good things that have happened and positive experiences can actually be hugely helpful because not only does it tune you into the good things that

that have actually happened to you, when you read over that, you can see, oh, actually, they were really quite nice things that did happen. And often, particularly for those people who are a bit prone to depression, it's very easy to forget. We know there's a lot of evidence that people forget the good stuff and they tend to really remember the bad stuff. So they have an impression that actually a lot more bad things have happened than good things.

Whereas actually that's often just not the case. So it's keeping that diary of positive events. It could be really simple things, just like you bumped into a friend unexpectedly and you went in and had a coffee with her. You had a nice bar of chocolate. Just simple kind of pleasures, if you like, or things that you actually really enjoyed.

If you just jot some of those down, particularly, as I said, with people I've worked with who are very prone to anxiety and worry, they find that really powerful, and particularly when you get to a point where you might be feeling quite low. Just having a look over that and remembering that actually, you know, things aren't so bad as you might imagine because your head is telling you, oh, everything is going wrong and things are always going wrong. But actually, by looking at a simple kind of diary of those kind of events can be actually very positive, right?

So the second thing, Gail, is to nurture what we call a wise mind. In psychology, there's three. We often talk about the emotional mind and the rational mind. So the idea of the emotional mind is that when something happens to you, particularly something bad happens, so maybe there's a crisis or an accident or some adversity happens,

One option is to go totally by your emotional mind, which might be to panic or to, you know, to really react in a very emotional way, maybe get very angry and argue with somebody. So the emotional mind kind of pushes us in one direction. And then we have our very rational mind, which is really looking at a situation very logically, not being driven by our emotions.

But then the third element is what's called the wise mind. And the wise mind is effectively picking the best of both of those things. So kind of picking out the best of our rational mind and saying, okay, what is the situation in this situation? You know, what is the best option for it? But also tuning into our emotional mind a bit and saying, well, actually, I really am really uncomfortable with this. These negative feelings are telling me something. So kind of nurturing both the wise mind

The wise mind is nurturing both the rational mind and the emotional mind. And that's really at the heart of switchcraft. It's the heart of this decision of when do you stick with what you're doing and when do you switch? That's effectively trying to tune into your emotions as best you can, as well as your rational mind as best you can. And ultimately, hopefully, that'll help you make the best decision you possibly can in whatever situation you're in.

Elaine, what are you most curious about today? That's an interesting question. Oh, dear. I suppose I'm just most curious about just what's going to happen in the future, I suppose. I mean, I tend to be very optimistic. And I think with so many things going on, you know, and there's a lot of uncertainty in my own personal work life at the moment, actually, because we're, I won't go into all the details, but there's a big merger of universities. And I'm genuinely curious about what's going to happen in the future.

how is that all going to work out? How's it going to all pan out? So, you know, it's a bit of a specific thing, but I think, yeah. And then there's a lot of scientific questions that I'm really curious about. And yeah. Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to? You know, clearly this is a very rich book with a lot in it that we just don't have the time to cover. And is there anything you want to make sure you get to say about the book or what's in it that you can leave people with?

I think we've probably covered most things. I think, I suppose the main message of the book is that there is no one size fits all. And I think that's something I really wanted to emphasize. And one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because I think a lot of, you know, a lot of books and a lot of people talk about almost the search for the one big thing that's going to really help change your life. And, you know, there are certain things that do make a difference. And as you said, there are things that are evidence-based and that make a difference.

But actually, at the end of the day, the main message from Switchcraft is that, you know, no technique is going to solve every problem you're likely to be faced with. So you really do need to diversify. You need to have lots of different tactics up your sleeve, if you like. And that's really the main message I hope people have got from the book that

And hopefully Switchcraft can help people to nurture that ability to make the right decision for the right situation you're in and to become a bit more flexible and agile about how you adapt to the world around you. It's a great message to leave the podcast on. I can't thank you enough for speaking with me and thank you for sharing your insights. Well, thanks very much, Gail. I really enjoyed talking to you and thank you for having me on.

CuriousMize@Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Mancabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen.

Each episode, we give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's Susie Sheehy's book, The Matter of Everything, How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World. Susie takes us inside the minds of some of the most influential scientists of their time, whose work informs the technology that we use today. She shares the creative brilliance it took to conduct their research. I loved this book.